In this edition of The Smashing Daily you’ll find a great article about Web accessibility, two thought provoking articles about supporting weird browsers, some nice links about mobile things, a much needed OpenType tool, sad (or happy) news about a split, and the problem with :hover. Enjoy!

If you’ve been working and experimenting with responsive Web design techniques, the first part of this slide show by Chris Mills doesn’t contain much news for you (although there’s probably something in there that you didn’t know yet). But at least take a good look at the last ten slides, just so you know all the great stuff we’ll be able to use in the future.

Marco Zehe has been working on Web accessibility the past five years for Mozilla. In this very interesting article he wonders if the Web can compete with native apps when it comes to accessibility. Unfortunately not. Now go ahead and read the article (maybe that might help in making the Web accessible within the next five years).

Rachel Andrew asks: “What does it mean to be a professional Web developer?” She explains that it’s your job to deal with legacy browsers, operating systems and devices, and that supporting all that old crap actually makes the Web a better place.

If you’ve been browsing the Web on an iOs device for a while, then you probably know that some links don’t just work right away, that you have to double-tap them in order to follow them. The first tap shows the hover state, the second tap follows the link. Nicholas C. Zakas did some research on this feature/bug and found some possible solutions.

HTML5 was developed by WHATWG. This group saw the need for further development of the HTML spec, while W3C didn’t think that was a good idea, and focused on XHTML instead. XHTML turned out to be a bad idea, so W3C decided to cooperate with WHATWG. They never really got along very well, and now they decided to officially split up. You can expect many opinions on this subject, and in this article you’ll find two of them by Bruce Lawson and Shelley Powers. Here’s another one by Anne van Kesteren10.

Articles about new, exciting and powerful OpenType features for the Web start to appear here and there. I have been linking to some already, but I hadn’t found a tool to easily test them before… until now. Richard Rutter made this tool which lets you test which OpenType features your font supports.

Last Click

Using The Nintendo DSi Browser

People often say: “we don’t have to test our website in X browsers, because people don’t use those”. Well actually, people do, and there are some weird ones out there that you might want to try out to at least know how people will use your website. Anna Debenham wrote this article about the Nintendo DSi browser. A very interesting read, and absolutely well worth your time.

Vasilis van Gemert is the Principal Front-end Developer at Mirabeau in The Netherlands and a board member of Fronteers. His aim is to close the gap between design and (front-end) development. He believes the excess of knowledge he has can be better used by others, by more creative and smarter people. You can follow him on Twitter.

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